Friday, November 30, 2012

Things are moving along smoothly in Game Maker. It is quite simple, as I learn to use it. I've already have a little guy with arms and a rotating head who jumps about and collides into walls. Next up I want to tackle opening the inventory, picking up and storing objects, and being able to move them about in inventory (or dropping the items back to the world).

I'm reluctant to share any pictures/video for a while, since everything I'm doing, you have already seen and more. It will be interesting how guick I'll be able to catch up with this system.

The following objects need to be done before I feel caught up:

Title and Main Menu

Game Setup Screen and Multiplayer connection

Player Actions (punching)

Multiplayer Chat

Other players appearing on screen

Inventory screen and handling

Not that i'll be doing any of those things in that order. I also may work on some new content before finishing all of those.

Best part about using Game Maker is it is supported by steam. I can release free demo/incomplete games on the Steam Workshop, for everyone's access. However, I'm not sure how to approach this as closed alpha testing. Maybe I'll just have to make a private Drop-Box location for testers.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

This blog has been dead for quite a while. Some of the readers that I know personally know why.

As I tried to hash out the lighting in Descend, I found the whole system was slowing down. So while trying to figure out if I should scrap the lighting system, I was thinking about my approach to creating this game. I feel full heatedly that I could to everything I set out to do in the game with my abilities in coding in C# and using XNA. However, I have other things I like to enjoy doing, involving music, friends, and my fiance. So I stopped, setting down the game to pursue other hobbies.

However, my love for problem solving keeps pushing me back to coding. I've researched a handful of game development tools looking for an easier way to handle a 2D multiplayer platformer game. At first I was looking at Unity. It looks great, it's easy to use, works with C# and ports out to many systems. It's great with 3D graphics and is set up for game development. However, it extremely lacks in 2D gaming support. People have found ways around it, but the more I tried it, the bigger the headache.

Recently I have been trying Game Maker by YoYoGames. I'm weary as it has it's own handful of issues. They created a game development studio that allows even a caveman to put together a simple game in about 5 minutes with drag and drop features. It only works well with 2D graphics and uses it's own coding language. It has multiplayer support and many built in features that should allow me to create the game faster, not having to worry about the little things. The code language isn't hard to follow, and you can expand the program's capabilities greatly through adding your own code.

Well, we'll see how it goes. I'm starting from scratch, but I'm hoping I'll catch up to where I was before in no time.